


About that Leap of Faith,

by hansbekhart



Series: Kings County [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Homecoming, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:34:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25207783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hansbekhart/pseuds/hansbekhart
Summary: Sam opens his mouth. He’s probably going to say something reassuring. It would make sense. Steve knows what it must look like, to Sam and the rest of them. How carefully they’d not watched him read through the letter. How only Bucky had looked up, when Steve ran out into the snow. Whatever Sam is about to say will probably be crushing and kind and also completely, totally, one hundred percent off base.“Sam,” Steve says, before this situation can get any worse, “I’ve never seen that letter in my life.”
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Kings County [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/233079
Comments: 18
Kudos: 118





	About that Leap of Faith,

**Author's Note:**

  * For [przed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/przed/gifts).



> This story references my other Cap series, namely [Let's Stay Together](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13456122), the [fic immediately preceding it,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13338864), and [the Kings County series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/233079) in general.

It’s snowing sideways in Queens, and the world outside the plane is as gray and unpleasant as they were told to expect. When they’re climbing into the car, Steve calls out, “Hey, you remember,” just as Bucky slams the car door closed behind himself.

“Remember what?” he asks when Steve follows suit, shaking snow out of his hair.

He has to think about it for a second. The car is icy cold, and completely silent. “The snowman,” he says belatedly. “That snowman we tried to build outside my building, when we were -“ 

“Seven,” Bucky guesses, and Steve nods hard enough to tweak his neck. “You didn’t think of it for almost a week after the snow fell, so it was,” they’re both laughing now, their breath blowing plumes between them, “ _awful_ underneath the top bit, full of garbage and horse manure and grease -“ 

“Still got the bottom part rolled,” Steve says. 

Bucky says, “You didn’t wanna stop until you put your hand right onto half a dead cat.”

“Could smell it on me for weeks,” Steve agrees. 

“I was,” Bucky says, and then stops. Steve waits, but when Bucky doesn’t say anything else he turns the car on, lets the engine heat up. 

“Wisconsin,” Bucky says after a while. “They sent me to Wisconsin. The Army did, I mean.”

Steve looks over at him. “That’s right. You did winter training there, before they shipped you to North Africa.”

Bucky shakes his head. He turns his smile out towards the gray slush accumulating on their windshield. “I couldn’t believe how white the snow was out there,” he says, slow and rueful. “I didn’t trust it. Took me months not to feel squeamish being out in it.”

Steve flicks the wipers on, and slush peels away from the glass. “You okay?” he asks.

Bucky slants a mean look at him. “I’d be okay if you never asked me that again,” he answers.

“It’s not too late to go back to Wakanda,” Steve says. “Or Manhattan. You haven’t seen the lights at Rockefeller in about a hundred years. What do you say?”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “Just drive, old man. We’re gonna be late enough already.”

They’d landed out on a private airfield near LaGuardia, and as they trawl south on Grand Central Parkway Steve can just about make out the looming saucer-shape of the old observatory towers, built for a Stark Expo years after the two of them were gone. Even the highway feels bare and quiet, most of Queens too sensible to be driving around in a storm like this. Bucky is quiet in the passenger seat, and Steve lets him be alone with his thoughts, whatever they might be. 

When they pull off the highway, the streets are shrouded in snow, anonymous. Forest Hills is a neighborhood of detached homes and driveways, a long ways from the blocky tenements and brownstones they grew up with. Esther’s home is just one in a long row of two story homes, closer to one corner than the other, distinguishable only because of the wheelchair ramp built over the front steps. There’s a big space out front that’s probably a lawn in the summertime, held off the sidewalk by a little brick wall - its snowy expanse undisturbed except by a little trail of paw prints, almost invisible. The walk is shoveled, at least.

Steve parks behind Sam’s car. He’s turning around to grab the flowers and champagne from the backseat when he realizes that Bucky hasn’t moved, is staring silently up at the house and the lit menorah in the window and the little shapes of his family just visible through the front window. It looks warm in there.

“Buck,” Steve says. He’s not sure if Bucky will answer - he’s got that far off look in his eyes that sometimes reminds Steve of the way Peggy was, in the last year of her life. “Hey. We don’t have to do this, you know. If you don’t want to. I’m not gonna make you go in there. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go, Bucky. Anywhere at all.”

Bucky’s lips part, and his eyes move. From this angle Steve can’t tell what he’s looking at, or if he’s looking at anything in particular. For a moment, he thinks Bucky will actually take him up on it, but then he turns and looks at Steve square on. Steve’s fingers tighten reflexively around the cellophane wrapping. “Hey,” Bucky says. “You remember when you spent your last nickel buying Becca a birthday present?”

Steve blinks. Refocuses. “Sure,” he says slowly. “It was when my ma was in the hospital, that first real bad time. We thought there was enough money to last but then there wasn’t, and I’d run all out of food.”

“You,” Bucky says. “Heh. You threw up Becca’s birthday cake. And then you fainted.”

Steve swallows. “The things you choose to remember,” he says warningly. “I’m gonna start thinking you’re faking the rest of it.”

Bucky smiles crookedly. The first time Steve had spoken to Bucky after - after Princess Shuri’s miracle work, after he was free of Hydra’s triggers - had been through a video screen, and the first time Bucky had smiled it actually, honestly made Steve weep, seeing all those little crinkles around Bucky’s eyes. “Oh, I remember. You threw up Becca’s birthday cake on Becca. I thought my ma was gonna skin you alive before she figured out what was wrong with you.”

“She made me come and stay with you guys,” Steve says. He drops his eyes. It’s too much to look at Bucky sometimes. Some memories are just easier to remember than others.

“You were with us for almost three weeks,” Bucky says.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Your family took good care of me. Didn’t have to, but you did.”

Bucky stares at him for a long moment and then says, “That was the first time we -”

Steve waits, but Bucky doesn’t finish the thought, just looks at him. Then he looks back at the house, and Steve feels the trap close around his neck. There’s no way in hell Bucky’s doing anything but walking up those steps and into that house. 

Esther Barnes. Steve’s hands shake just thinking of her. The last of everyone he’d ever known, besides the two of them - lurching their way towards an ending only God alone knew how far off. He’d actually seen her after he’d come out of the ice, just once, only a few weeks into what he still sort of thinks of as the future. He’d sat numbly through two hours in Prospect Park with her and his SHIELD handlers, while people gawked and took sly photos of the two of them. The next day he’d taken SHIELD up on their offer of an isolated, secure cabin, instead of facing down a little old lady and all her crushing expectations. He hasn’t seen Esther since, except in the photos that decorate Sam’s house. 

Part of him had honestly hoped, just a little, that Esther would pass away and spare him the trouble. He still wouldn’t be able to look himself in the mirror, but then again he usually doesn’t like to anyway. 

“You okay?” Bucky asks, very softly.

“Oh my God,” Steve says under his breath, and gets out of the car.

-

The door opens before they’re halfway up the steps. There’s a woman standing in the doorway, almost as tall as Steve is, her gray hair scraped tightly back into a bun. She’s weeping. “Come in,” she says rubbing the tears brusquely off her cheeks. “Come in, come in.”

It is warm inside Esther’s home, and it smells like potpourri and home cooking, and coming in from the cold everything feels bright and overheated and too much, especially when Bucky makes a low, wounded noise in his throat and brushes past Steve without even taking his shoes off, to drop to his knees at Esther’s feet.

She’s even smaller and older than Steve remembered. There’s a walker next to her chair, and her hair is done up neat. She seems beyond speech, tears flowing down from behind her glasses. She touches Bucky’s face, very gently.

“Sorry, Bug,” Bucky says softly, staring up at her. “I’m so sorry. I kept you waiting so long.”

“Well,” Esther says, “you’re here now, aren’t you.”

Bucky gathers her up in his arm, her thin arms winding around his neck. They’re still talking, soft and shaky to each other, Steve’s Yiddish too rusty to follow even if he wanted to. He wants to give them their privacy. He wants to sit down on that massive, horribly floral couch and watch them forever.

He clears his throat, and holds out the flowers to the older lady who opened the door for them. “Hi,” he says, helplessly banal. “I’m Steve.”

She’s still crying, but she laughs at him. “I know who you are,” she says, and mercifully takes the flowers. “I’m Leba. Their niece.”

Becca’s daughter, Steve realizes. He’d been on the USO circuit by the time Becca gave birth, and hadn’t gotten the news until a letter and a little photo finally caught up with him in Chicago. He’d never met her - not in person at least, not really. Once Becca had taken Steve’s hand and put it on her belly, and he’d felt those little kicks. It’s funny, though - he’d remembered the baby’s name as Leah.

Sam comes over and relieves Steve of the champagne as he gets his coat and boots off. “Thank God you’re here,” Steve tells him, fervently grateful. Sam’s laughing at him too; he’d overheard Steve introducing himself.

“No serum in the world that makes you good at this kind of stuff, huh?” he asks, and gathers Steve into a tight hug.

“Parties?” Steve asks. 

Sam pulls far enough away to look Steve in the eye, holding him at arm length. “Feelings,” he says, very seriously.

Well, he’s not wrong. “Been too long,” Steve tells him, and lets himself go in for another hug. They’d had to do a lot to get Sam back in the country after Berlin, in a public enough way that he wouldn’t immediately get tossed back into one of Ross’ secret prisons. It’s been a while since Steve has seen his best friends outside of video screens.

He shakes hands with Sam’s husband awkwardly. James’ eyes keep straying over towards Bucky and Esther, and the distraction is a welcome relief. Seeing James and his namesake in the same room makes the differences between them stand out: James is missing the cleft in his chin, and he’s actually a bit taller than Bucky. They’re related, clearly - but James isn’t a ghost risen from the dead to spite Steve, which is how it’d felt to meet him.

“So how’s uh,” James asks, and then falters when he looks back at Steve. He still has the same crooked grin as every other Barnes Steve has ever met, and he deploys it now. “How’s uh, uhm …”

“The Mets?” Steve asks, sparing both of them.

“Not even gonna make it to the playoffs this year,” James says, sounding relieved. Between them, Sam relaxes by milimeters. 

“You never know,” Steve says, some long dead ghost of team spirit stirring him. When he’d woken up they’d broke the news of the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn in almost the same tone that they’d told him about the deaths of everyone else he’d ever loved in his life, which had been kind. 

“Steve,” Bucky calls.

Steve feels the weight of years dragging his every footstep. Every time he’d run instead of taking Esther’s call or answering her letters, or accepting even one of the invitations Sam had issued, dutifully, on behalf of the Wilsons or the Barnes or his group down at the VA, pressing endlessly to widen Steve’s circle of safety past just him and Natasha. He kneels at Esther’s feet too. It feels penitent. “Hi Esther,” he says. Then what? His mind is empty. Everything he thinks of feels like a weird intrusion on Bucky’s time with her. Any apology he could make would be pathetic. 

“Oh, Steve,” Esther sighs, and takes his hand. She’s holding Bucky’s hand too. “You’re just the same, aren’t you?”

It makes his breath catch in his throat. She would know, wouldn’t she? Her and Bucky, the only ones left that would know. “It’s nice to hear you say that,” Steve manages. She doesn’t sound mad at all. She’s looking at him the same way she’s looking at Bucky. 

“I’m so happy you’re together again,” she tells Steve. 

“Me too,” Steve is about to say, when she does something incredibly strange: she squeezes both their hands, and then brings all of their hands together, folding Steve’s hand into Bucky’s and her own on top of theirs. 

Steve looks to Bucky, perplexed. Bucky’s looking at Esther, his brow furrowed. “I’m so happy,” she repeats, and then squeezes their hands again, smiling, and releases them. 

-

Leba puts the flowers into a tall vase and plops them in the middle of the dinner table while Sam and Steve finish setting it. They seat Esther at the head of the table, Steve and Bucky on either side. Sam next to Steve (thank God), and Leba next to Bucky (thank God again; the thought of facing both Bucky and James for the entirety of a meal is too much for Steve to handle). James rounds out the other side, facing Esther.

The flowers sprawl in every direction, nearly grazing the bubbly surface of the lasagna platters. He sees Bucky in soft focus glimpses. The edges of his smile. The waves of his hair. The muted rumble of his laugh as he teases Esther. He hasn’t stopped smiling since they arrived. 

“Steve,” Sam says. 

“I’m here,” Steve replies, and then catches the patient tone to Sam’s voice. Steve shakes off his inattention. “Sorry, I’m -”

“It’s cool,” Sam says, laughing. “We get it.” 

“Three months without seeing Sam,” James says, and reaches a metal hand towards his husband. “I was a mess.”

“Hey, I didn’t see you wrecking any multinational treaties to get back to your man,” Sam laughs, and this part - this is easier, Steve thinks. He never could look at the two of them directly: their flirting, their open affection and attention towards each other, the shape of their lives together. 

Steve usually lets people hang old fashioned values on him - values that were old fashioned even when he and Bucky were young, or at least felt that way in the crowded, on-top-of-each-other lives that everyone leads in a tenement, sharing walls the way New Yorkers share a subway car: with stubborn dedication to the fiction that no one else can hear or see or smell you. It made Steve feel hollow all the way through to correct someone about what people were or weren’t like “back in his day,” so he quit trying. 

Sam and him, though, they’d talked about it. Sort of. Once. About month or so after he and Sam had made friends. The morning after Steve had flinched his way through re-meeting James, when he and Sam had met up for their usual run around the Mall. Sam had said, with a confidence Steve had found comforting, “I know it’s not because he’s a guy.”

“No,” Steve had told him, wanting Sam to know. That he wasn’t - wasn’t prudish, or bigoted. “No, it’s -”

“Is it because of who his family is?” And then Sam had faltered, one of the few times Steve has ever seen him search for the right words. “About your uh. Your history with, uh.” 

It had been such a relief. Sam had understood, without Steve having to put into words the parody of coming home that he’d been granted, waking up to find his entire life made into a myth, every person he’d ever known dead or transformed into little wrinkled gnomes, his city rebuilt over and over on top of itself, his skyline like dinosaur bones rotting away in between all those glossy science fiction towers. Sam had understood how much easier it had been to look forward. For Steve to look for ways could be useful, be used. Sam had stayed kind and steady and unrelenting, and Steve had continued to fall helplessly into the orbit of Sam’s life, which was also steady and unrelenting, and learned to just look away.

But now, somehow, he feels alright watching Sam pull James’ hand towards him and brush a kiss over those silver knuckles. He feels just fine. 

When he does look away, it’s to find Bucky looking at him, something steady in his gaze that Steve doesn’t know how to read - and then can’t, because Bucky looks away almost as soon as Steve glances over. 

-

Dinner is - nice. Normal. Strangely normal. Steve takes down about half a tray of lasagna by himself. He listens as Leba talks - about Rebecca’s granddaughter and the little dramas at her hair salon, about the neighbor down the block that she and Esther have been feuding with ever since Esther had torn down some kind of anti-abortion sign in the lady’s front yard. No one’s demanding anything in particular from him: Sam and James retreat into each other, angled so closely together that they’re practically sharing the same chair. Bucky’s leaned back in his chair, looking warm and relaxed and happy as he listens to his niece and his sister talk across him.

He doesn’t know what he was expecting. More tears, probably. Tears and recriminations. A recitation of all of their sins. A chance to atone. Instead, it’s just … dinner. 

Steve feels a nudge against his foot, then a kick, deliberate. He glances back up, startled, and through the drowsy haze of flowers Bucky drops a wink at him. Steve grins; he can’t help it. He kicks back. For a minute they scuffle under the table like kids, squirrely after the interminable hours of Passover or Thanksgiving. Bucky’s got his arm folded over his chest, the press of his lips a dead giveaway to their horseplay. Steve can’t even remember the last time he felt so warm.

When everyone’s finished eating and the plates are scraped and the leftovers wrapped up and the dishwasher humming, they move the party back to the living room. Platters of jelly doughnuts are put on the coffee table, and the scrapbooks are brought out.

There are two of them, one old and one new. Bucky reaches for the new one eagerly - vinyl, covered in shocking pink leopard print - steadying it on his knees. The first page is a family tree, drawn out by hand, and Leba and Esther draw close to explain each branch. James leans in too, like a kid settling in for story time.

Steve picks up the other scrapbook. It’s long and heavy, and the cracked leather cover is the same color green as the Statue of Liberty. It looks about as old as Steve feels. It says Treasures across the front of it, and when he opens the cover page he’s startled by his own face looking back at him. It’s one of the propaganda posters they made during the war. _He’ll Never Quit!_ it says. The next page says, _Together We Can Do It!_

The third page almost makes him close the book right there: a blonde woman hanging off of Captain America’s shoulder, her slip halfway down her shoulder, her bosom heaving. It says, _Disease is An Agent of War!_ and, underneath, _You can’t beat the Axis with VD!_

Steve turns the book around to show Sam, nonplussed. Sam squints at it, and lets out a bark of laughter. Everyone else looks up too.

“Your clippings!” Esther says cheerfully. “I’ve been saving them for you. I cut out every single article I found about you, during the war. The Library of Congress says it’s one of the best collections they’ve seen.”

Steve hefts the scrapbook between his hands, feeling its weight. “Wow,” he says. 

Something shifts in Esther’s expression. Steve’s stomach cramps, a little unnerved from the hand holding earlier. He’d forgotten how much Esther used to knock him off balance when she was a kid. She’d been as much of a wrecking ball as Steve ever was.

“Steve,” she says, and holds out her hands. “Before you look through that, I need to return something that belongs to you.”

He settles the book carefully onto Esther’s blanket-covered knees. She flips through it quickly, making a satisfied little noise when her fingers find an envelope clipped to the top of a page. The envelope itself is blank, and decades newer than the pages he finds inside, which feel soft and thin between his fingers.

Steve smooths the pages flat and reads, _2/05/43_

_ Dear Steve,  _

_ I did not believe there could be so much sand and dust in the world, and about half of it is in my underwear. I'm sorry I haven't written. I wasn't sure what to say to you, and anyway what is there to say? There's sand and dirt and I sleep in a hole in the ground more often than not, and I'm using up all my glad words writing my family. I can't pretend with you and it'd kill me to try. _

Esther pats his knee, smiling, as Steve reads the rest of the letter.

When he’s finished, he reads it through again. He sits with it in his hands, the words blurring together. He’s aware that no one is looking at him, which seems strange considering how long he’s been sitting here, silent, staring. He refolds it into thirds and tucks it back into its envelope, but can’t make himself put the envelope back on the coffee table. Esther’s hand is still on his knee, patting gently, most of her attention on Bucky, whose fingers are spread across a photo of their parents. They look so much younger than Steve remembers them being.

Bucky is - telling a story about their mother. About - about her cooking, or a story she used to tell, Steve only catching the German words. James is sprawled out, his long legs over Sam’s knees. His chin propped up on the heel of his metal hand, listening, smiling. Sam’s neck is bent over his phone, half a jelly doughnut oozing onto his fingertips. 

“Where,” Steve says, and clears his throat. “Esther, where did you get this?”

“It was folded into one of your sketchbooks,” Esther says. Her eyes are clear and guileless, enormous behind her glasses, the same blue as Bucky’s eyes. “I found it while we were cleaning your apartment out, during the war.”

“During the war,” Steve repeats. “Which sketchbook? Do you remember?”

Esther frowns. She looks heavenward, searching her memory - and then snaps her fingers. “There were quite a lot of naked people,” she says. She’s laughing, too old to blush about it. “I think it was one of the ones I gave to the Smithsonian.”

“But that can’t,” Steve says, and then remembers, as clear as if the book was in his hands: thumbed, ink-stained edges. The historians showing him his own property hadn’t been too old to blush at all the nudes. The memory of actually using the sketchbook filtering through like sunlight underwater, like cigarette smoke, like the smell of the sugar factories curling in through the windows of their old apartment. 

Abruptly, Steve is standing. “Gonna get some air,” he mutters, and brushes past everyone without waiting for a response.

-

Outside is cold. Outside is bracing. Steve walks halfway down the driveway before remembering that he’s left his keys in his coat pocket, which is still inside the house. He can’t think of what excuse he’d invent, anyway - there’s nothing in the car, no errand he needs to run, no emergency alert on his phone that wouldn’t show up on Sam’s as well. He thinks, absurdly, of shoveling the walkway.

He walks to the car anyway. Sits down on the back bumper, facing out into the empty street. He’s got the letter in both hands, and only a deeply ingrained instinct of paper as a precious commodity keeps him from shredding it: from nerves, or just to keep from reading it ever again.

He’s been out there for a little while when the front door creaks open, spilling warm light onto all that cold snow. Steve hitches his shoulders up around his ears, even though he already knows who it is, who would be sent to see if he’s okay.

“Hey man,” Sam says, and settles back against the bumper next to Steve. “You alright?”

“Sure,” Steve says, mulish. “Are you?”

“I’m not the one who ran out in the snow with no shoes on,” Sam says mildly.

Steve looks down at his feet. No socks either. “Hell,” Steve says. Then with more feeling, _“Fuck.”_

Sam, being aware that Steve is a grown adult instead of a cardboard cut-out, says nothing to that. They stare out in silence, letting snow dampen their shoulders.

After a few minutes, Steve hands him the letter. Sam takes it from him, but doesn’t open it. He looks at Steve instead, his expression endlessly compassionate. So he’d already known about it. All of them had known. 

Sam opens his mouth. He’s probably going to say something reassuring. It would make sense. Steve knows what it must look like, to Sam and the rest of them. How carefully they’d not watched him read through the letter. How only Bucky had looked up, when Steve ran out into the snow. Whatever Sam is about to say will probably be crushing and kind and also completely, totally, one hundred percent off base.

“Sam,” Steve says, before this situation can get any worse, “I’ve never seen that letter in my life.”

Sam gapes at him. It’s the only word for the expression on his face. He looks the way Steve had felt, reading _All those months you spent dreaming about the goddamn Army and all that time I spent dreaming about kissing you. I think you never heard me once trying to tell you I love you in all the ways a man can ever love a person._

Abruptly, a lot of things - little things, the way Sam talked around certain subjects, Esther and her hand holding - make a lot more sense.

Sam narrows his eyes. “Seriously?”

“Yup,” Steve confirms. 

“For real?”

“For real.”

“Shit,” Sam says, heartfelt. “Aw, man.”

Steve’s whole body hurts. He’s drawn so tight that even the touch of snow falling into his hair is excruciating. Christ, he’s gotta get a hold of himself. 

They watch the snow fall. “Shit,” Sam says again, and then a long while later, “Nah man, I got nothing. I’m racking my brains but I got nothing. Zip. Squat.”

“Yup,” Steve agrees.

“But you did,” Sam says, and Steve watches his face do that thing that people do around him a lot, trying to find words delicate enough for what they think are other people’s sensibilities.

“Have sex,” Steve guesses, a little meanly. It’s hard not to be defensive. People these days act like fucking didn’t get invented until after Steve had been dead for twenty years.

Sam’s eye roll looks reflexive. His expression loses some of that compassionate edge and gains a bit of worried irritation. He looks more like Steve’s friend that way, which is a relief. It helps. His chest still feels strange, burning up, but he can breathe. 

“Yeah,” Steve says, when he can. “Yeah, Buck and I, we were - yeah, we did.” It comes out slow. He never really told many people, after all. Their friends knew all about him and Bucky. Their families never knew, or at least that's what Steve believed up until a minute ago. The SSR never knew. Their unit never knew. It’s hard to find the words, too. All the words they had for each other have changed. “When we were together, we were together. But it wasn’t like that.”

Sam’s eyes go down to the letter, still in Steve’s hand. Steve gives it to him. Sam unfolds it and starts to read, and Steve means to let him finish it before saying anything else, but it burst out of him: “We were just kids. We’d get drunk and screw. In February of ‘43 we weren’t even doing _that_ , we were both with other people, at least before, before -” 

He falters. Before the spring, when Bucky had come back from North Africa. Then they’d fallen right back to it, Bucky’s presence absolutely enormous in the little apartment they shared. It’d been so much easier to roll over in the night than to pay the subway fare to Greenwich Village. Everything about Bucky had been easy, in every sense of the word, when nothing else was for Steve. But it was never like that.

Sam’s watching him. There’s a sharp look to the expression. “Okay,” he says. “So what’s the real story?”

“Esther says she found it in one of my sketchbooks,” Steve says. “Sounds like it was the one I was mostly using that spring.” One of his painting classes had had them using watercolors the whole semester, even for the live model workshops. That particular sketchbook had, as Esther had put it, a whole lot of naked people. Including - 

He shuts his eyes. Smells processed air and graduate student anxiety as he flicked carelessly through his own art. Numb until he hit that stretch of pages where the bright, Impressionist colors abruptly turn violently red and purple, burnt sugar colors. Just a few pages of arms, torsos, the shape of a soft cock nestled in the crook of a hip - and then back to those pale blues and studies of hands. 

He remembers - 

Sex, mostly. Drowning in it. Bucky hadn’t talked about his war much, no matter how much Steve had asked - had wanted to eat, and fuck, and drink, and fuck, and dance, and _fuck_ \- there had been days where Steve thought they’d starve to death instead of peeling their bodies apart long enough to go down to the corner store for some bread. 

But he can’t tell Sam about that. 

And regardless, he doesn’t remember _I swear I'll make you happy if you give me a chance_. Just Bucky, eating his fill, dancing, laughing his way through the springtime, until abruptly he'd been gone again.

It occurs to him that the letter could be faked. People fake stuff about them all the time. Entire books have been written about Captain America that aren’t any better than the propaganda films he made with the USO. But it’s Bucky’s handwriting. And it’s Esther. Who as a kid was sweet even if she wasn’t kind, and whose kindness Steve has been running from since he woke up in this strange, horrible new world. She’d known them. 

Steve looks over at his friend. “What should I do?”

Sam huffs, tucking his chin into his chest. “Steve,” he says, doubtful.

“You got married _some_ how,” Steve says, which gets a real laugh out of Sam.

“Yeah,” Sam says, “that was a trial in itself, lemme tell you.” 

Something loosens a bit in Steve’s chest. His shoulders come back down, and he clears his throat. Sam doesn’t say anything else for a few minutes, but the silence feels easier. It’s stopped snowing. Far off he can hear the crunch of tires, grinding carefully over the road. Somewhere, someone is playing music.

“Talk to him, I guess,” Sam says eventually. 

“I don’t know.” The idea of it seems both surreal and unbearably banal. “About what?” 

Sam slants Steve a sideways look, disbelieving. Steve spreads his hands and says, “But he never talked to _me_.”

Sam shrugs. “So what?” He flicks his wrist, just enough to make the pages shake. “He chickened out of giving you this, like, seventy years ago. A lot of shit has happened since then.” His tone is like Steve’s one of his group members, on a particularly dense day. “Pretty sure you guys have been through worse than an awkward do-you-still-like-me-yes-or-no kind of conversation.”

Sam gives him back the letter, and nudges Steve with his shoulder. “Come on, Steve,” he says. “Live a little.”

Steve sighs. Tips his chin up to the sky and sighs again, very deeply. Fills the entire capacity of his lungs with it and then lets it go, breathing huge plumes of smoke into the sky until Sam laughing at him. Then he sighs once more, just one more time, a little one, just for himself. “Okay,” he says. “Would you mind asking him to come out here?”

-

Steve doesn’t turn around when the door creaks open, as heavy boots crunch their way through the snow towards him. He doesn’t look over as the car settles under Bucky’s weight. And for a while they just sit together, close enough that he can feel the warmth of Bucky’s shoulder across the last few inches between them.

He hands Bucky the letter. Bucky unfolds the pages, shaking them carelessly straight. He makes a couple soft sounds as he reads, just one or two little hmm’s.

“What the hell, Buck,” Steve says, when he can’t stand it anymore.

Bucky laughs. It’s one of those sarcastic little huffs that Steve has always hated. “I forgot all about that,” he says. “Huh.”

Steve waits, but Bucky doesn’t say anything else. There’s a dumb little smile playing around his face as he turns the letter over, checking if anything’s written on the back. “Well?” Steve demands.

Bucky tilts a glance at him. “Well what?” 

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Steve demands.

Bucky sighs. “Hell if I know,” he says. 

“Do better,” Steve says.

Bucky rolls his eyes. “I mean - probably - I don’t wanna sound like _you_ or anything, but there was a _war_ on, Steve. I had three months back in New York and then - what was I gonna do, ask you to marry me and then fuck off to get killed in Italy instead of Libya? I don’t know. I really don't remember.”

“Your whole family thinks we’ve been married for about eighty years,” Steve tells him waspishly. 

Bucky shrugs. “So what?”

“So _what?”_ Steve asks, outraged.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, and turns to face Steve fully. His hand is loose in his lap. He looks as unbothered as he sounds, like Steve is the crazy person here. There are flakes in his hair. Steve looks up: it’s snowing again, whisper quiet. “What’s it got to do with anything now, Steve?”

“You never told me,” Steve says. He glares at Bucky, angrier than he’s been in a long time. “I _don’t remember_ you -”

“Steve!” Bucky interrupts, his voice sharp. Oh, that’s his CO voice. He used to pull that on Steve sometimes when they were in it together, when Captain America was in charge. It’s been a long time since Steve has heard that one, and it makes him laugh almost reflexively. “Come on. We were just kids back then.”

“That’s exactly what I said to Sam,” Steve grumbles, and Bucky laughs too.

“Look,” Bucky says. “I said a lot of dumb shit that both of us have forgotten about. You should feel lucky I never gave you that letter. Okay?”

Steve frowns at him. He’s pretty sure his face is doing a Captain America thing, but he’s confused and irritated but mostly confused and that’s just what his face does these days when that happens, like a defense mechanism against the future. “Why would I feel lucky?”

Bucky looks at him, and then looks away, staring blankly out into the snow covered street. “That’s a dumb fuckin thing to say,” he says.

Steve looks away too. Yeah. “Sorry,” he says.

“It’s fine,” Bucky says. He chews his lip. 

“So what uh,” Steve says. The silence is uncomfortable. Steve isn’t - he’s not a speechmaker, no matter what everyone else seems to think. The right words come to him only in narrow and specific circumstances, usually when he thinks maybe this time he really is about to die.

Hell. What else does he have to lose? 

He takes a deep breath and asks, “So what do you remember?”

Bucky blinks. He looks over at Steve and then away, and then back. His boots knock against the bumper of their rental car. “That you were my best friend,” he says finally. “You always have been.”

Steve holds his eyes. Their breath meets and dissolves in the chill air, leaving no trace behind. “Yeah,” Steve says, and holds out his hand. “That’s what I remember too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to @paulinezed for your charitable donation! This has been sitting in my drafts for ages, and this was a great opportunity to dust it off and get it finished. 
> 
> You can find me on twitter at [hansbekhart](https://twitter.com/hansbekhart). I've moved on to different fandom pastures from this one, but I do really want to say thank you to everyone who has read the Kings County series and my other Cap work over the years. <3


End file.
